Full Fathom Five (26 page)

Izza found Nick curled up under a cleaning cart near a park two blocks away. Groundskeepers had piled the cart with fallen palm fronds, then retired to a nearby cafe for drinks. Nick slept in the shade between the wheels, hands behind his head, dirty shirt pulled up to reveal his thin stomach. Save for the scar his face was smooth and soft, the way mainlanders painted kings asleep or saints dead. She climbed under the truck and punched him in the ribs.

He darted up, and she winced when his forehead struck the underside of the wagon. Nick awake resembled no king or saint Izza’d ever heard of. He cursed.

“Language.”

Confusion vanished when he heard her voice. “Izza.” He lay back on the cobblestones, and the top of his head grazed the cart’s undercarriage.

“That all you have to say?”

“I knew you made it out of the Plaza. I heard, from Ivy.”

“Ivy has a big mouth,” Izza said. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

“Thanks,” he said. “It was you who almost got me caught in the first place.”

“You would have been caught sooner or later. I saved you.”

“They fired me in the end anyway. Sleeping on the job.” He shrugged. “I thought you were leaving. For good, you said.”

“I have to take care of a few things first.”

“What kind of things?” That question had an intensity she didn’t like.

“The Blue Lady,” she said.

“She’s dead.”

“Maybe.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I need your help. I need you to follow a priest for me.”

“Why?”

“I want to know where she sleeps.” She pressed her hands against the cart, hard, until her arms shook and her fingertips and knuckles turned white. “And what kind of wards she has. What protections.”

“Some favor,” he said. “I didn’t mean why do you want her followed. I meant why should I help.”

She rolled onto her side, and looked at him.

“Because no matter how you try to talk it off, you know I saved your ass back in the Plaza. Because they almost stuck me in a Penitent that night, and now the guy who rescued me is in trouble. Because we’re the Lady’s children, and there’s nobody to help us but us.”

“Fair enough,” he said.

They rolled out from under the wagon and dusted themselves off on the street. Angry drunken shouts from the cafe heralded the groundskeepers’ return, and they fled uphill into the Palm, lost their pursuers in an open-air market mess of food trucks and jewelry stalls.

Together they climbed a shopping center across from the priest’s office. Izza searched the mirror-pool windows opposite for the woman’s face, while Nick stuck his head over the building’s edge and spit down into the clogged river of afternoon traffic. Whenever someone looked up, he ducked back onto the roof, chortling. She thumped him on the skull, and he stopped, for a while.

Izza spotted the priest before Nick grew bored enough to move on to a newer and dumber game. A lucky glimpse: the woman leaning against a windowsill and watching the clouds as if they held a secret. “That’s her.”

“The one with the lips?”

“I guess she has lips. That one there.”

“I see her.”

“I want you to follow her.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t steal her wallet or anything. Don’t get cute, or close enough she’ll see.”

“I’ve done this before.”

“Just follow her home. I’ll meet you in the Grieve at nine.”

“Sometimes these folks don’t go home. They drink, or stay in the office all night.”

“Keep after her, then—if I miss you at nine we’ll meet again at dawn. If that doesn’t work, leave a note in the warehouse.”

“Your friend’ll chase me out.”

“Cat? Tell her you’re looking for me.”

“Why not follow this woman yourself?”

“Have other things to do.”

“Will this be dangerous?”

“Is thieving dangerous?”

“Not unless you’re caught.”

“Right.”

He watched the priest, silent, for a while. “I wish the Blue Lady was here, is all.”

“I know.”

“I miss her.”

“Me too,” Izza said.

“Okay.” Closed eyes, a breath, a whispered prayer. “Okay. What’d this woman do to you, anyway?”

“Nothing,” Izza said. “Yet. And I hope it stays that way.”

She left him lying there, chin resting on folded fingers. Thin puckered lines showed pale against sun-browned skin through the ripped cloth of his shirt. She’d never asked about those scars.

Izza climbed down the dizzying height, from fire escape to drainpipe to garbage bin, to crouch in the alley and watch the sanctioned world walk past. Somber suits, linen dresses, suitcases, and bags: soulstuff condensed into physical form, life made concrete. She thought of the crabs she hunted in the surf, seaborne insects who built heavy shells around themselves. You could grab them by those shells, lift and throw, and watch the splash.

She slipped back east to the poet’s house. The afternoon streets in East Claw belonged to working men and women. Construction workers, shirtless, climbed bamboo frames, tool harnesses slung over broad shoulders. Teamsters drove wagons piled with grain sacks and bales of cloth and packaged goods across town to West Claw shops. Wood strained and leather creaked. A drover wiped her forehead on her sleeve, then swatted an errant cow with a goad. A road crew hauled up broken cobblestones, cemented new ones into place. Laundries flew a war’s worth of surrender flags from clotheslines. Shining Empire sailors toasted one another with sorghum liquor at a sidewalk table outside an Imperial restaurant. An old Kavekana drunk crouched alone on a corner, and watched her with milky eyes. She walked faster.

Margot’s street was deserted. She knocked on his door, but no one answered. She walked around the balcony and peered in the window. Room a mess, bed made, poet absent. Off for an afternoon stroll. If the watch had seized him already, they would have left signs. The door wouldn’t be locked, for one thing, or on its hinges. Watchmen didn’t like obstacles, and Penitents were a universal key.

She’d trailed the poet often in the three weeks since her rescue, and knew his daily routine and where he went on walks. After an hour’s hunt she found him southbound on Dockside—easy to spot, clad as usual in green velvet. Cargo cranes far off by the Claw’s tip flashed mirror codes of reflected sunlight as they swung containers ashore. Margot paused to watch two wagoners argue over a wreck, then walked on. Knees and elbows showed through his threadbare suit.

She scrambled across traffic to the dock and approached him from the south. He’d tipped his hat down to shield his eyes from the sun, and so didn’t see her until she drew even with him, saluted, and said, in mock-posh accent, “Good day.”

He muttered “Good afternoon,” then stopped. His hands slipped out of his pockets, and he swiveled around to Izza; she’d already taken a few skipping steps back, to keep out of arm’s reach.

“You came back,” he said.

“To warn you.”

“I’ve had one warning already today.”

“I heard.”

“You’re watching me.”

“Yes,” she said. “I don’t know what to make of you. But I think we’re on the same side. Or, similar sides.”

“Ms. Pohala said the same on her visit this morning. Do you also want me to forswear my work? Return defeated to my homeland?” He pointed vaguely out into the ocean, even though his homeland was more north and east than south.

“I think you should keep from getting stuffed in a Penitent, if you can.”

“She went to the Watch.”

“Yes.”

“She calls me a thief, and says the Blue Lady is a lie born of fear and wishful thinking.”

She ignored the second part. “Theft is a Penitent offense,” she said. “You need to hide.”

He turned, and walked away.

“Hey!” She ran to catch up with him. “This is real. When the Watch comes for you, they’ll slam you in a statue until you break.”

“If they prove my guilt, which is unlikely. At best, they’ll hold me until my government protests. Greater men than I have written from a cell. Gertwulf composed his
Virtuous Voyage
while a debt-zombie, scribbling in the few minutes each morning before his contract took hold. Once the Iskari priesthood secures my release, I will leave the island. Meanwhile, I wait.”

“You think your priests will help you?”

“Troubadours have been convicted of worse than theft, without grand consequence. The Prelates of Iskar fight a long war. Indulgences are permitted for their soldiers.”

“You’re no soldier.”

“All poets are soldiers. We fight our wars across centuries.”

She didn’t understand, but didn’t ask. She felt other eyes on them, passing cabbies and dockworkers intrigued by the odd pair arguing on the street. No watchmen, yet. She grabbed Margot’s hand and pulled him along the docks. Walking, at least they presented a moving target. “You think,” she said, with a smile to a dirty man selling flowers from a basket, “that they’ll take you in a legal way, and hold you so people will know. That they won’t just stuff you in a Penitent and forget.”

“They wouldn’t.”

“They do. It happens all the time.”

“Ms. Pohala has no right—”

“She doesn’t need right if she has powerful friends,” she said. “Come on, smile a little. There’s people watching.”

He tried. Even without looking, she could feel the falseness of his grin, like rubber dragged over skin. “I will not leave. I must seek my Lady.”

“She’s dead,” Izza said.

“There is no death where love lives.”

“You don’t know death well,” she said, “if you think that.”

“I will not leave.”

“Then hide.” She heard Cat again in the back of her mind. Small choices. But she owed this man. “Let me help.”

“Can you hide me from Penitents?”

“Maybe. Better than you can hide yourself. Long enough for you to book passage off the island.”

He adjusted the angle of his hat. “You seem awfully concerned with my welfare for a girl who ran from me when I asked a simple question.”

“It wasn’t a simple question,” she said.

Out near the tip of East Claw, a tugboat dragged a containership into dock: an expanse of metal, sail-less seagoing abomination of Craft. Its sides were cliffs, more an extension of the peninsula than a ship, a mountain inverted and afloat. “I suppose not,” Margot said. “But I refuse to run. I found something true here, and terrible. Gods spoke through me. Iskar with her daily prayers and unrequited loves, her flag-jousts between sky knights, her high cardinals professing faith and her human beings wandering alone—she has no claim to match that. This is my place now.”

“You’re dumber than I thought,” she said.

His laughter, too, was sharp. “I never claimed brilliance.” He removed his hat. His bald patch was pale, though peeling and red with sunburn. “This is not your fight. If they take me, let them take me. If they kill me, let them.” He stopped, and swallowed. “Kill me.”

“No.”

“I offer you a gift,” he said. “I offer you your own life, which I think you value. Your freedom, from the Penitents and from the law you would otherwise feel compelled to confront to keep me safe. I ask you to promise by all you hold sacred—and I think I know what you do hold sacred—promise to let me go. Do you understand?”

She nodded.

“Aloud, if you please.”

“I promise.”

“And let me ask a gift of you, in return.”

She understood, now, but it was too late to take back her word.

“Tell me. The Blue Lady. The Green Man. I have seen them. They worked through me. They played my nerves like a violin. You know them.”

Those were her names. This was her faith. He was a usurper to speak them. “I do.”

“Ms. Pohala calls me a thief. She claims I stole power from the mute idols her priests build. She claims I used this power to charge my words with fire. But I have not stolen. I heard gods sing to me, and scream, and whisper. I am not mad.”

“What do you want from me?”

“The gods. Are they real? Do they live? Do they speak? Do they feel? Do they love?”

She remembered a soft touch on a feverish cheek. She put her hand there, but the skin was cool, and smooth. “Once I fell from a dockside crane. The Blue Lady caught me.” She lifted her shirt, and showed him the rippled scar on her side, the imprint of four fingers and a thumb. “There.” She lowered her shirt again. From his expression, and his caught breath, she knew he had seen. “She wasn’t used to people yet. She caught me, and it burned.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you,” as if she hadn’t heard the first time. “Go.”

She ran inland, away from the sea, away from the false metal cliffs and the neon lights and the man in the green and threadbare suit.

When she knew he couldn’t see her anymore, she retraced her steps and trailed him through the streets toward home.

36

Kai worked hard, or seemed to, for the rest of the day. She turned many pages of binders, moved her eyes over a hundred intake forms, and all the while planned her confrontation with Mara. Evasions. Pursuit. Mara’s collapse, and the slow determination Kai would help her build to tell Jace the truth, or some of it at least.

Unless Mara really meant to frame Kai for everything. In which case their conversation might take a very different path.

Near sunset she clocked out and headed uphill toward Mara’s house, a few blocks from her own. Kai and Mara rarely met outside work, but Mara’d helped out when the pipes in Kai’s basement burst, and Kai’d leant Mara a hand moving in. She remembered the way, and soon stood on the sidewalk before Mara’s pale purple two-story. Porch ghostlights clicked on as night deepened, timer-driven. The lights cast dancing shadows on the lawn.

No signs of life. Kai checked her watch. A little after seven. Mara wouldn’t be home for an hour yet, at best. She removed a pad from her purse, scrawled a brief note—“Mara, need to see you, urgent, family business, Kai”—ambiguous enough she hoped its meaning would be safe. She opened Mara’s mailbox to slip the note in, but the box was crammed with newsprint, letters, and ads. She folded her message double, sealed it with a drop of wax, and was searching for a cranny into which the paper might fit when her mind caught up with her eyes.